Spell Casting: Purrfectly Portable Edition

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Spell Casting is an Arcade-style game originally released on the PC in 2016 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game puts players in the role of a young cat-person who receives a Harry Potter-esque magic kit in the mail and studies to learn its spells, with those studies taking the form of players tracing a line quickly without making mistakes.

The presentation here is fairly simple, with hand-drawn 2D characters, Harry Potter-esque music, the narration of the cat version of Dumbledore, and the “oof!” sounds your cat kid makes whenever you make a mistake (you’ll be hearing that a lot). For a game touting itself as magical, it’s a presentation that’s disappointingly devoid of magic.

As for the gameplay, this game isn’t kidding when it says “portable edition”, as this game is unplayable in docked mode. Instead, players in portable mode must use the touchscreen to trace the patterns in the game’s books. This seems like a huge oversight, as the Joy-Con controller’s gyroscopic motion could have made for an adequate “wand”, but when you actually get to playing the game you’ll see why this probably wouldn’t have worked out.

In short, this game is extremely unforgiving, and even players who follow the lines as closely as possible will find themselves hearing the tell-tale “oof!” and having to start over. Sometimes it’s inexplicable why this happens – you’re following the line exactly, and you still get treated as if you mistake. You draw the line right to the endpoint, and the drawing doesn’t finish for some reason. Try to complete it and it counts as a failure… again. For all of this frustration, players gain the privilege to… do the exact same thing all over again, but without the handy guide showing you where to go.

I like what this game was attempting to do. Replicating the feeling of using Harry Potter-esque spells in a videogame is really enticing, and if it was done right, this could have been a delightful, magical game. Unfortunately, this game is so fixated on punishing players for the slightest mistakes (and sometimes no mistakes at all), and so devoid of providing any sort of joy from success, that there’s no good reason to play it unless you’re a masochist looking to be frustrated. Banish this game far from your valuable time and money, it’s not deserving of either.

tl;dr – Spell Casting is a handheld-only Arcade-style game that has players using the touchscreen to trace lines on-screen to have their cat magician student perform spells. Unfortunately, the controls here are so broken that the game will frequently fail you even if you painstakingly stay on the line, and success doesn’t feel magical in any way – it only brings more frustrating work. Stay away from this magician, it’s a fraud.

Grade: F

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